Oprah Winfrey is a big fan of Eckhart Tolle and she’s doing a series of live web seminars based around the book A New Earth. You can sign up for the seminar for free on Oprah’s web-site or you can watch the videos on YouTube.

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I had noticed Eckhart’s books in the shops long before I started reading them. To be honest the covers and titles always turned me off as they seemed really cheesy. I thought the Power of Now was all about ’seizing the day and living for the moment man’ and A New Earth is sub-titled ‘Finding Your Life’s Purpose’. To be honest they seemed like a lot of other generic self-help books.

But I eventually read his books and found them really useful. In a very basic sense Eckhart’s writings are about being aware of your internal dialogue and turning it off, and with being present in the moment. The ideas are similar to Eastern meditation practices, and Eckhart comes at it from a similar spiritual angle. Now I don’t know what people mean by being ’spiritual’, at this point I haven’t had any experience that I would class as spiritual.

But I don’t need to interpret Eckhart’s ideas in a spiritual way for them to be useful to me. I haven’t watched all of these videos, I just don’t have the time right now. But I’ve heard from people that they’ve found these useful and has helped them put some of the more difficult ideas in to practice.

The other day I met a man who didn’t believe there was such a thing as hypnosis or trance. He was telling me how it’s just down to picking people that are suceptible to suggestion and social pressure to perform (he was speaking about stage-hypnotism). It can be difficult to convince these kinds of people because they know how the world works and resist anything that conflicts with their world view. Now I could of course put them into trance right there and then, but that would be unethical.

By far the best introduction to hypnosis and trance is contained with this book. Don’t get me wrong, Paul McKenna’s main stream introduction to NLP is great in itself, it’s easy to read, covers all the basics you need and even introduces some EFT.

But it’s the CD enclosed which is the real reason to get this. It’s a 45 minute hypnotic induction that will put you into trance guaranteed! Some people do need to listen to it a few times, but it will put you under. And you’ll know that you weren’t just sleeping when you consistently ‘wake up’ to Paul saying ‘3, 2, 1, Wake Up!’

Breaking news! Reliving past traumas over and over as practised in many talk-therapies might not be such a good thing after all!

Following the latest study showing that some anti-depressant drugs are of little clinical benefit for most patients, more and more individuals are likely to seek treatment through various forms of psychotherapy, which collectively have come to be known as “the talking cure”. However, a recent article in the Psychologist journal, entitled When Therapy Causes Harm, cautions that approximately 10% of people get worse after starting therapy.

Read the rest at the Guardian: When it’s bad to talk

I always love reading crazy theories and have recently heard about something called Bicameralism. Julian Jaynes wrote about his theory in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

The basic ideas is that ancient humans to an extent functioned as ’schizophrenics’ in that they had frequent auditory hallucinations. They literally heard voices speaking to them and interpreted these as the voices of gods.

Julian uses this explain how language and consciousness developed in humans and why early humans really believed that their gods were speaking to them. It’s a fascinating theory that touches on many interests of mine, ancient history, psychology, evolution of humans.

What’s particularly interesting for readers of this site is that it might help to explain how and why hypnosis works. Maybe we were used to taking ‘commands’ from one half of our brain for many thousands of years before both hemispheres started working together.

It’s also interesting that some areas of the brain that deal with language use also help us to recognise and distinguish rhythm. If you know anything about hypnosis you’ll know that speaking in certain rhythms (and listening to repetitive rhythms) has a hypnotic effect. Tribes in Africa engage in dances to rhythmic music for hours in order to go into a trance, and in the west we even have a whole sub-genre of dance music called Trance. This is the reason why for example Richard Bandler does hypnosis work with a musical backing track.

Read more about Bicameralism at Wikipedia: Bicameralism

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The Julian Jaynes Society